“As your administrator I would like a bit more wiggle room in terms of placement.”
“Not my problem.”
As expected.
Wells headed to the door. Hand on knob, ready to hear the complaints of the part-time art teacher, he stopped at Horse’s beckoning.
“Ten by fifteen feet.”
“What?”
“My shed. Ten by fifteen feet.” Horse said it as if the dimensions explained it, but knew that it begged for an explanation. He gaped at Wells with a strong hint of mockery.
“So?”
“I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately.”
“So?”
“You don’t recognize it? Thoreau. From Walden. I thought you were an English major?”
“Ah, the lesson.” It was Wells’ turn to be snide. “Of course. You weren’t using child labor to build a garden shed. A garden shed, I should mention, whose supplies you bought with the money kids paid to go on the field trip. No, this wasn’t exploitation. You were teaching them about American Transcendentalism.”
“Exactly. Now you get it.”
“Very Victorian. The children in the workhouses are learning a valuable trade. I think Blake wrote a poem about it.”
“He wrote several.”
“Great.”
“I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.”
“I feel like I’m the bone.”
“Why is that?” Horse asked rhetorically.
Wells said nothing, left and pulled the door behind him, leaving Horse laying on the couch
Horse yelled at the closed door, “By the way, Jenny Matthews speaks a lot more in class and seems to have more confidence. Not that anyone seems to care!”
Ten minutes later Horse emerged from Wells’ office.
A county sheriff was speaking with Peter.
“So,” Horse said, siding up to Ms. Binnis. “What’s up?” He nodded towards Peter.
“Something that doesn’t concern you,” she replied, smiling.
“Still…”
Listening, Horse shuffled over to the faculty mailboxes, and then flipped through the flyers and forms that had come over the snow break.
“Where is your father?” the sheriff asked.
The obvious question.
Peter looked down at his feet.
No answer.
An aide entered the office carrying Peter’s coat, hat, and gloves that she must have gotten from his locker.
CHAPTER 3
“You’re Peter’s teacher?” Mr. Bissonette asked again, shaking Horse’s hand.
With a mitten clenched under his left armpit, Horse took his bare right hand back and let it hang. Mr. Bissonette’s house was an old saltbox, painted a color Glidden had labled Red Geranium on the paint can with peeling white trim. Lumps of snow indicated bushes planted along the front, but Horse was sure their trunks and branches were shattered by snow. ‘Probably last season, too,’ he thought. ‘Bissonette was a man who hadn’t landscaped since his wife had left him. It had been her project.’ It was all speculation. Horse was quick to judge, and usually right. Looking up, he noticed long icicles with wide bases that hung from the front edge of the roof, a sign of poor insulation.
“Yes,” Horse lied. ‘I said I was a teacher.’
“Mr. James?”
“Close enough.”
“How can I help?”
The neighbor stood on the inside of the threshold wearing a green chamois shirt over a blue t-shirt and jeans, feet stuffed in wool socks. It was nearly two in the afternoon. Already he had drunk three beers, having spent the morning at the sherriff’s officeanswering questions about the past two days and what he knew about Dan and Peter.
“Nothing?” they had asked.
He knew nothing.
Neighbors… he had said.
They borrowed each other’s tools…
Peter was a good kid…
No… no idea where Dan is. The boy said nothing…
Peter had stayed with Bissonette over the weekend—the man insisted. Sunday was spent clearing trees and shoveling—he hadn’t cleared the drive in time for the plow. Monday morning he had planned to take Peter to officials—he had finally freed his car Sunday night. Instead, Bissonette had to go alone. Leaving the sheriff’s before lunch, no work available because of the snow, he picked up a six-pack on the way home, and was well into it when Horse knocked on the front door.
“Well, as you can imagine, we’re worried about him,” Horse said. His hand was getting cold. Purposely, he left it out hoping that this man would invite him inside so he could look around. Horse was curious.
Why he was curious, Horse did not know. ‘It wasn’t his student,’ he thought. He never knew, but at a young age he had given himself over to the pull of mystery and whatever consequences came with it. After the officer had taken Peter away, Horse told Ms. Binnis that he felt ill and needed a sub. Before she could protest, he was writing vague sub plans, threatening students to behave or else, and walking out to his car with a leather satchel hastily filled with work to correct. Twenty minutes later, he stood on this depressing stoop with a cold right hand, listening to a dullard list a weekend of tasks ranging from shoveling snow to cleaning up after dinner.
“He took off this morning,” Mr. Bissonette said. “I don’t know what’s up, but I had planned to take him to the sheriff’s or state trooper barracks this morning. The next thing I know, he’s off on the bus.”
“So you called the school?”
“No…” Mr. Bissonette started to reply. He looked at Horse. “Are you bringing homework for him? Because he’s not here.”
“No.” Shuffling slightly back, Horse put his heels at the edge of the top step of the porch.
Let me in.
“No… I’m surprised he’s not back, yet,” Horse said. He didn’t mention that school didn’t release students for another hour, curious if the man knew.
“Oh, the sheriff is finding him a placement.”
“He won’t stay here?”
Bissonette shifted his weight from foot to foot, in a guilty manner. The third beer was weighing heavily on him, but another was calling him from the fridge. Peter was what he didn’t want to think about.
Or Dan.
“No,” the man finally said.
“He was with you for two days, wasn’t he?”
“Yeah. As I told the sheriff, when I realized that Dan—that’s his father—was gone, I knew we had to tell someone. Except, we were trapped. I mean, I needed to get my old chainsaw just to get out of the driveway. Dan had borrowed it last fall, when his Skihl crapped out and he was working to clear a place for a goat shed…”
“A goat shed?”
“I guess it’s just a shed that you’d keep goats in.”
Silence fell upon them. Mr. Bissonette stood in the door, Horse on the porch.
“So he’s not coming back?”
“Dan?”
“Well, Dan… but I was thinking of Peter.”
“He barely stayed when he was here. The snow kept him. He kept looking over at the house.” Mr. Bissonette shifted his feet. “I guess he just wanted to be home.”
“Did you look around?”
“For Dan? Yeah.”
The two looked towards Dan’s.
“When the boy packed up, I looked around to see if he’d been around.”
“Had he?”
“The place looked neat.” Bissonette scratched his chin. “If it’d been me, I’d have a sink full of dishes.” Then he chuckled. “Actually, I don’t know if the dishes would get to the sink.”
‘I’ll bet you live that way now,’ Horse thought.
“So he bolted this morning?”
“Yeah. I spent yesterday cutting fallen trees and moving the snow. I was going to the sheriff’s, but Peter shot out of here before I was even dressed. Caught the bus. When I had my coffee I went to the sheriff’s, told my story, and they went to the school.”
“No.” Bissonette scratched his chin. “Didn’t want to say a word.”
“You don’t know what happened to Dan?”
“No,” he replied. “Peter said he was on a job overnight and got caught in the storm.”
A look of worry crossed his face. ‘To be honest,’ he thought, ‘I’m glad he’s not staying here.’ Bissonette knew he was a good kid—an honest kid—but something about him was not typical for his age. ‘Too independent?’ he thought. But he was not one of those crazy kids, raised by wolves, as they said, who knocked about eating junk with ill manners, wearing T-shirts under winter coats or winter hats in the summer, and needing a face cloth. ‘No, Peter was all right,’ he thought. He could not put words to it, but Peter did not need him. In his experience, teenage attempts at independence still required an adult to answer a lot of questions, and clean up whatever inevitably gets broken. The idea of a twelve-year-old not needing an adult to take care of him gave Bissonette the creeps. Over the weekend, Peter had been a ghost, taking care of his own business so deftly that he had noticed him gone in the morning. While nursing his first beer an hour before, he had thought about all of this. Something was not right. If he doesn’t need an adult…
“But Peter knows something,” he said to Horse, a bit guilty of fearing the worst of the boy.
In the creeping darkness of the afternoon, Horse opened the barn door.
The power was still out. What little illumination there was came from an emergency crank flashlight Horse had in his cannibalized road emergency kit. Sweeping the beam, he found the house key hanging from an old dog collar, which was itself snapped around a post in the middle of the small barn. Unclipping it, he put it in his outer coat pocket. Sweeping the light around again, he saw only a cluttered barn.
No body.
“What were you expecting?” he muttered to himself.
Still, he knew that most problems had obvious solutions, except to the person most intimately involved. It would not have surprised him if the father had been lying on the far side of his truck, frozen after a heart attack. ‘Occam’s Razor,’ he thought. The most obvious explanation is often the correct one. Each year he taught his students Poe’s “Purloin Letter” just as the class ramped up for science fair. The answer is often right in front of you. With this in mind, he crouched down and swept the light under the car and to the far wall.
Nothing.
Inching over to Dan’s truck, he shined the light in the cabin, illuminating a few layers of work clothes, neatly folded and sitting on the passenger seat, and some tools behind the seat. There was the Husqvarna, sitting on the floor in front of the passenger seat, next to a large discarded Nissan stainless steel thermos. In the cup holder was a worn plastic Green Mountain Coffee thermal mug.
‘I could use a saw,’ he thought. Waste of a good saw. Then he wondered if there was going to be an estate sale. This was followed by the realization that he was probably contaminating a crime scene, a thought he quickly dismissed. After a quick visual scan, he left the barn. Hayden Carruth’s poem “Regarding Chainsaws” about an old McCulloch that wouldn’t start popped into his brain and he headed towards the house.
The first chainsaw I owned was years ago,
an old yellow McCulloch that wouldn't start.
The snow was deep.
Wearing Sorel boots, large enough to not punish the soft corn on his smallest left toe, Horse retraced the path Bissonette and Peter had made back to the house. Horse assumed the key was for the front door, but reconsidered half way there. The back door was closer, but also felt like the more familiar route for anyone who lived there. Outside of the village people rarely used their own front doors. Closer to the driveway, the back door also lent itself to mudrooms and less formal parts of the house. As he lived on the outskirts of a village, still linked to the center by sidewalks, it was habit that brought him to the front. He needed to think like a kid. He released a sigh but carried forward. To his relief, the key did fit and he opened it into relative darkness.
A bit after three o’clock, the low sun didn’t make it much through the dense woods that surrounded the house. Stomping off the snow at the threshold, Horse cranked his flashlight again. The zipping sound echoed in the cold, dark rooms. Untying his double knots, he removed the boots and stepped into the foyer.
It was bitter. Stepping further into the house, Horse expected some relief from cold, but realized this was conditioning—the houses he usually entered were occupied, and thus heated. “Mind over matter,” he muttered, but felt no warmer.
Shining his light up the stairs in front of him, his breath floated in the beam. A post and beam kit house with an open floor plan, he could make out an open room to the right and left of the stairs. Swinging the light around, he caught the cold woodstove in the back wall of the main room. Pulling off his right mitten, he cranked the flashlight again for a few minutes more of light. Whirling filled the rooms and the light brightened. He counted off one hundred turns and then stopped.
Photos of Peter and the missing Dan fell under the circle of light. Peter’s big blue eyes contrasted with the yellow jersey worn in third grade town soccer; Dan with a buck; Peter—about ten years old—on Dan’s lap on their couch, all smiles, in a black-and-white photo. At least half of the pictures on the wall had one, the other or both in them. There were a few photos on the wall of a baby—another with a toddler—being held by a woman that had features much like Peter’s.
His mom, Horse thought. She looked worn. Tired. A thin body, even when bundled up in sweaters while they played in a pile of leaves. It was still clear that the child in her arms was a source of pleasure. The child was laughing. In another, a three-year-old was dressed as a pirate. The costume was homemade. ‘A soul,’ Horse thought. Her soul.
“What happened to the mother?” he said under his breath.
It’s cold. Horse was about to put his hand back in the mitten, but the light dimmed and he had to crank it again. Again, he counted to one hundred, and then he went into the kitchen. Pulling out a drawer, he found a green plastic flashlight with batteries. It worked, and he pocketed his own.
Opening cabinets, he found a lot of pasta; boxes of macaroni and cheese and cans of ravioli. There are several boxes of cereal. Tuna fish. Cookies. All of them were store brands, indicating that the buyer was frugal. In the refrigerator Horse found a surprising number of apples—at least two bushels. Checking the small composting bucket on the counter, he found three apple cores inside, all of which seemed to have been put there in the past week or so. Back in the refrigerator, he also found a big block of Cabot cheddar, string cheese, and a gallon of milk, partially gone.
Their stores, he thinks, are pretty well balanced.
What’s missing?
Thinking through his own, unhealthy adult diet, it came to him: coffee.
Horse thought of the two mugs in Dan’s truck. He swung the beam onto the counter, and it fell onto a Mr. Coffee twelve-cup coffee maker. There were no used grounds in the brew basket. Looking in the compost bucket again, he found no used grounds there, either. Returning to the cabinets, he found two Nissan stainless steel thermoses, a half used box of non-bleached No. 4 coffee filters, and a Braun grinder. A white ceramic container sat next to it, the word kaffii inscribed on it. At the bottom were a bit over two cups of beans. Horse noted how dry they were, even though the container was air tight.
Suddenly, he was overcome with a desire for a cup.
‘Must be the aroma of the beans,’ he thought.
In another cabinet sat an entire shelf of coffee mugs. No tea. He checked the refrigerator again and found no cream. In the freezer were wrapped family packs of chicken and two tubs of ice cream, one with the seal broken. Opening the dishwasher he found ten bowls, twelve glasses that had milk film on them, two pots with the thin film left behind after boiling pasta, a colander, and a host of spoons and forks.
No knives.
He found no peanut butter, or regular butter, either.
Allergy?
Drawing an index card from his pants’ pocket, Horse made a note to check with the nurse for any allergies Peter might have—and to find out about his mom.
The rest of the house was less interesting. It was very neat; not just picked up, but well cleaned. Checking the bathroom, Horse noted that he could find no dried urine on the bowl or floor that was common in a house with boys. ‘Someone had cleaned,’ On his knees, he aimed the flashlight where the bolts hold the toilet to the floor, a spot often missed by hasty cleaners: nothing but white. Upstairs, he found both Dan’s bed and Peter’s were made. Clothes were put away. The hamper had less than a week’s worth of laundry, although Horse noted that it all belonged to the boy. Even Peter’s shoes were lined up.
‘Bissonnette had said the father was at an overnight job,’ he thought. It might explain the clothes. Of course, they had only Peter’s word that the father was coming back. Or had been only gone a few days.
Returning downstairs, he examined the closets and found stairs leading down to the basement. Attached to the wall he found a large red fire extinguisher mounted next to a heavy duty Maglite. It was a heavy model that took four large D batteries and could be used as a club. He pulled it out of its wall clip and turned it on. After noting that the extinguisher was fully charged—everything was in order, he thought—he took a look in the basement. With the powerful beam he didn’t need to leave the bottom step.
Nothing.
Finally, he went back to the living room. There were three guns in the gun cabinet, all hunting rifles and clean. Horse did not want to touch them, as he was convinced that the police would soon be combing the house for clues and the guns would be the first thing they’d check. Something had happened to Dan, he was sure. ‘Time to go,’ he thought, returning the large flashlight to its clip.
His hand was freezing—even with his mitten on, it had remained cold—but he needed to go to the bathroom. Under his left armpit he pinched the cheap plastic flashlight from the kitchen, while taking the right mitten off with the left hand. With little range of movement—he was afraid of dropping the light—the mitten fell instead. It headed for the toilet bowl. Horse swatted at the mitten, his free right hand knocking it to the wall beyond the pedestal sink. Body turned, light directed towards the sink, he saw it.
Absentee List_An Old Horse Mystery Page 3
